Native Soil
by Wilusa
Summary: A 1991 DS fic, in which Barnabas meets and loves a remarkable woman. I began writing this, and gave up on it, many years ago. I'm posting the completed portion now as a tribute to the star who inspired it, the magnificent Jean Simmons.
1. Chapter 1

DISCLAIMER: Dark Shadows and its canon characters are the property of Dan Curtis Productions; no copyright infringement is intended.

_**Note:**_ This fic, suggested by a film I loved in my youth, has a beginning and end...but, unfortunately, no middle. I may or may not remedy that at a future date. For now, please read all three "Chapters"!

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Elizabeth paced up and down in the ill-lit foyer of Collinwood, her patience wearing thinner by the minute. The family had left as requested, not daring to ask for an explanation. But she still felt embarrassed and, yes, afraid. The one saving grace of this business was that her enemies would be unable to figure out the point of it. Damned if she herself could...

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Barnabas Collins moaned and leaned back in his chair. Victoria's chair, the one she'd occupied when she was snatched out of the year 1991 and flung into the past. He'd been sitting there for hours - straining to contact her, perhaps even join her in 1790 through sheer force of will.

Nothing, nothing.

_This is useless. __**You're**__ useless._

No! Rest. Gather strength, try again.

He gasped at a touch on his shoulder. "Barnabas - are you all right?"

He steadied himself and looked up into the drawn face of his distant cousin, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. He felt a pang of guilt.

"I'm all right, Elizabeth." If she only knew. "I just have to keep trying. At night, because that's when it happened, when she was taken. Does it frighten you to have me sitting here in the middle of the night?"

"Yes, but I'm mostly afraid for you. Opening your mind to - whatever is out there." Her hand lingered on his shoulder, and he thought of his gentle mother, so like her. "Can I do anything to help?"

"No. There was a...bond...between Victoria and me. If anyone can reach her, I can."

_Face it, you fool! Victoria is gone, absorbed into Josette, to die on that hellish night at Widows' Hill. And if you find other incarnations of Josette, the same thing will happen again and again, till the end of time._

He managed a wan smile. "Go up to bed. I'm a night person. There's no need for anyone else to lose sleep."

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His smile faded with Elizabeth's footsteps. The atmosphere of the gloomy mansion descended on him like a pall.

Collinwood. The house he'd heard of, dreamt of all his life, but never entered as a normal, living man. The place that was to have been so special - foul and contaminated now, like everything he touched.

Strange, how one small decision could affect countless lives. He'd begged his father to let him go to England, to supervise the careful dismantling of their ancestral home and its shipment to America. But Joshua had refused. Why? To keep Barnabas from seeing the "old country" he loved? Was it payback, because the boy had shared his mother's vaguely pro-British sentiments during the Revolution? Whatever his reasons, Joshua had insisted the family solicitors could handle things in England, and Barnabas was needed in Martinique.

He wondered, not for the first time, if his father had later invented that tale of his having settled in England as a form of atonement.

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The last rattle of carriage wheels died away on the moor. Elizabeth turned and strode into the inner room.

"They're gone. To spend the night, no doubt, speculating that their Queen is a witch. Or at least, consorts with a warlock." She glared at John Dee, who seemed to be dividing his attention between a crystal ball - in which she saw nothing - and an unusually complex astrological chart.

"On that point, Madam, they would not be far wrong," he replied mildly. "But the Collins family - in every generation - has occult secrets of its own to protect. They can be trusted not to draw attention to themselves by spreading scandals. And besides, the shipbuilding contract Your Majesty gave old Mordecai should be enough to seal anyone's lips."

"We need ships. We'll surely need more after we engage Philip's Armada." She gazed narrowly at him. "And we need the counsel of our greatest admiral, Tom Seymour."

Who was also the only man she had ever loved.

"Ah, yes. Your Majesty's...admiral."

"Hang it, Dee!" She banged her fist on the table, and took fleeting satisfaction in seeing him jump. "Tell me why you insisted we come here! I've tried to summon the ghost of Tom Seymour in the Tower, in Chelsea - even at Hatfield, where we first met. _Why here?_ To the best of my knowledge, Tom never set foot in this house, or even this part of England!"

"Your Majesty is quite correct. He did not."

"Then _why -?_"

He looked up from the chart at last, and fixed her with a piercing gaze. "Because I am hoping to give Your Majesty a _living_ Tom Seymour. Unless, of course, you have your heart set on a dead one."

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Elizabeth sat in stunned silence for five minutes, watching Dee putter with the chart. Then she found her voice.

"What manner of black magic is this?"

"White magic, Madam, white."

"White magic, then. How think you to bring back a man who's been dead nigh on forty years?"

Dee pondered the question, weighing his words. Then he said, "May I ask Your Majesty's views concerning the afterlife? What do you believe happens to us after death?"

It was her turn to hesitate. Frowning, she said, "Whatever churchmen claim, I know the dead can return as ghosts. I've never seen one, but I have heard testimony I must believe."

"Very true. We may linger for a time as ghosts. Then what?"

Another frown. "Heaven or hell, I suppose."

"Your Majesty sounds dubious."

"I am. I've known many mortals, but nary a one of them a saint. And precious few, sinners deserving of damnation. Life is a struggle. Most of us, in getting through it, do the harm we do unwittingly."

Like herself. She'd fallen in love with Tom and thrown herself at him. Tom...her half-brother's maternal uncle, her stepmother's second husband and widower. Tom had seen the teenaged Elizabeth as a child until she forced him to take another look. And because of Court intrigues she'd been too young to understand, their love had cost him his life. Did she deserve to burn? Surely Tom did not.

"Purgatory?" Dee suggested.

"Mayhap..." That idea disturbed her. "It seems a waste that souls should spend - centuries? - useless, in a kind of gaol."

"Mayhap they do not. Where might purgatory be, Madam?"

_"Where?"_

"From time immemorial, men have conceived of heaven as being _up_ and hell _down_. So where might purgatory be? Where is left?"

His meaning slowly dawned on her. "In between. _Here._"

Dee nodded. "Our souls live again, Madam, in new bodies. To wage new battles, learn new lessons. We all have many lives, many loves. Your Majesty has existed from the beginning of time - as have I. And the entity Your Majesty knew as Tom Seymour."

"You realize this is heresy."

"It is heresy. It is also the truth."

She turned it over in her mind, then nodded slowly. "I've heard this notion before, suspected it myself. You seem to speak with certainty. And I know you have strange sources of information, John Dee.

"So I'll grant you that the dead live again, in new bodies. What has that to do with the matter at hand? If you'd planned to tell me some ten- or twenty-year-old Collins _is_ Tom Seymour, you would not have sent him away."

"I would not. The situation is not that simple.

"There are patterns in rebirth, patterns that were understood by the seers of old. For example, the signs in the natal chart rotate clockwise, one House, from life to life. A few very skilled astrologers, knowing all the details of a chart, can look backward - and forward - in time. See the person as he was in the long-ago, and as he one day will be."

Dee's voice had dropped to a whisper. His eyes gleamed. Elizabeth stared, mesmerized, as he reached out to touch his crystal ball. "A _very_ few astrologers can use other tools, see more. Learn all, _all_..."

He broke off. "Well. Unfortunately, in this case, not quite all. But I believe I know enough."

"You've obviously studied strange...mysteries, techniques, these last years on the Continent." For a moment, Elizabeth felt fear. Then it was gone - _removed? - _and she knew this was the same old friend who'd helped her select the date for her Coronation, thirty years before.

"Aye, Madam. And with Your Majesty's approval, I intend to use them to bring back the naval advisor you need. The man you love.

"Far in the future, there exists a man named Barnabas Collins - a member of this family. Barnabas Collins is the reincarnation of Tom Seymour. He does not consciously remember that life, or his relationship with you. But those memories could be reawakened. He's desperately unhappy in his own world. He believes - whether correctly or not, I cannot say - that he's lost the woman he loved in that time, beyond any hope of getting her back. He feels useless, and worse than useless - a source of grief and danger to everyone who cares for him.

"Barnabas Collins is sitting _in this room_, alone, with his mind deliberately opened to influences from the past, on a spring night in 1991..."

"And you can bring him here?"

"Almost certainly, yes. But before I attempt it, there are two things Your Majesty must know. Details that may cause problems.

"First, he is in this room. But in 1991, the room is not in this country! Collinwood has been relocated - carefully reconstructed, from original materials - in the New World. Which proves, by the way, that Your Majesty's colony will fare better in future than it has to date.

"The second matter is more alarming. I mentioned a living Tom Seymour. But Barnabas Collins is not exactly living..."

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At the conclusion of Dee's tale, the Queen buried her face in her hands for a long moment. When she looked up, her eyes burned into him.

Her voice trembled with rage. "You want to let this happen? Why? To assure that he'll be miserable in the eighteenth century, and the twentieth? I will not have it! You can spare him, pluck him out of his own time _before_ he becomes a vampire. Before he meets Josette DuPres, or after - I care not. Bring her with him. If he is truly Tom Seymour, I can win him back from any other woman!"

"I doubt not that you could, Madam." Dee repressed a smile. Seymour had been executed at forty-one, when Elizabeth was sixteen. Now she was fifty-five. He had told her Barnabas Collins would be, to all intents and purposes, thirty-five. But far from worrying over how she might appear to him, she wanted him even younger - with Josette DuPres in tow! Only Elizabeth.

"Unfortunately, what Your Majesty wishes is impossible. I can only bring him back to sixteenth-century England from within Collinwood. Barnabas Collins was born in the New World. The house was rebuilt there during his lifetime. But he was traveling on business, then preoccupied with family crises. He never set foot in Collinwood until after he'd become a vampire. Given that fact, our best opportunity is the night I spoke of, in 1991.

"However, once we have him, there is hope. Hear me out..."

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Fifteen minutes later, Elizabeth nodded slowly. "All right. But before we begin, I have one more question. Will this Barnabas Collins _look like_ Tom Seymour?"

"I think so. Hope so. But I said I don't know everything about him. I know intimate details of his life, but I've never seen his face.

"The degree of physical resemblance depends on how closely the two lives are linked. But in the end, it may not matter." He gave her a questioning look.

Elizabeth met his gaze squarely. "You needn't worry. Whatever he looks like, it will make no difference to me."

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Suddenly, the darkness around Barnabas was thickening. Closing in on him. He tried instinctively to rise from the chair and fell back, overcome by dizziness.

_Dizziness?_

The room spun crazily; a ringing began in his ears and grew to a roar. He was unable to breathe. His pounding heart seemed about to burst from his chest.

_Oh God, please let it stop!_

And then it was over.

He seemed still to be seated in the same or a very similar chair. He inhaled cautiously, exhaled. As his vision began to clear, faces swam into view...a man and woman, watching him warily. Their expressions unreadable, but definitely not surprise or fear. The flickering light of candles cast eerie shadows on the wall.

Barnabas took a deep breath. _Think._ The dimensions of the room seemed unchanged. So he was probably still in the drawing room of Collinwood, in another time. 1790? No, the furnishings were wrong. They should have been those he remembered from the Manor House, newly moved. And not the nineteenth century - he still had scant knowledge of that era, but he had seen enough family portraits and photographs to be sure these clothing styles were wrong.

An earlier period, then... Sudden shock, as he reeled at the implications. _Well, Barnabas, you always wanted to visit England!_

He took a closer look at his hosts, through half-lidded eyes. Had they been attempting to summon a demon? If so, they would be sadly disappointed.

The man, a sixtyish graybeard. Something vaguely familiar about him. The woman...

Ah, the woman. An ageless beauty, red-gold hair gone gray at the temples. Facially, she bore a striking resemblance to Elizabeth, and to his mother. But without her having spoken a word, he sensed this woman was different. Proud, confident, forceful - God, he was already thinking of her _blood!_ Warm and rich, he could almost taste it! A strong, regal woman...

And suddenly, he knew. He'd seen portraits of this woman - wondered, now, at his never having noticed that his mother resembled her. Queen Elizabeth. The greatest monarch in British history. And he had thought of - _**thought of -!**_ Something in the pit of his stomach turned to ice.

"Master Collins?" the graybeard was saying, carefully polite. "Barnabas Collins? Are you all right, sir?" So they _had_ known of his existence, brought him here deliberately! That surprised him more than anything else.

"I'm all right, Master - Dee." Where had that come from? He had heard of John Dee, the foremost astrologer of the Elizabethan age. But how had he connected that name with this face and voice?

Still experiencing a detached surprise at his own behavior, he rose gracefully and executed a deep, formal bow. "Your Majesty."

"Pleased to meet you, Master Collins. Do sit down, be comfortable. Ah...you are most perceptive. 'Tis well we had no thought of concealing our identities, eh, John?"

The Queen sounded good-humored, mildly amused. But when Barnabas looked up into her sea-green eyes, he read barely contained excitement.

"Master Dee." He retreated to the chair, conscious of unwanted stirrings within himself. "Whatever you're attempting, I trust you realize you're dealing with...dark forces. I hope you've woven protective spells around yourself and, especially, the Queen." Would Dee understand that? Or could the man possibly not know what he was?

"No spells, Master Collins. And yes. We know."


	2. Chapter 2

One plan I had for the middle section... Barnabas visits Seymour's grave and reads on the monument: _"He that, being within me, though he be dead yet shall live."_ Stunned, he blinks...and when he looks at the stone again, he sees the conventional Bible quote that reads something like this: "He that believeth in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live."

That really happened. To _me_, as I looked at a monument in Westminster Abbey! I was so shocked I didn't even note whose monument it was.

To elaborate: I had that experience some 35 years ago, and never forgot it. I incline to real-life belief in reincarnation. But I certainly didn't imagine I was the reincarnation of anyone buried in the Abbey.

Many years later, I had a strange dream. I seemed to be fighting in a medieval battle...and I heard the horrifying news that the leader of our forces had been felled by an arrow that struck him in the eye.

Years later still, I learned there really is a famous battle in which that's believed to have happened. The Battle of Hastings, in 1066! A tapestry - the Bayeux Tapestry - shows the English King Harold II being struck in the eye by an arrow. He died, and William the Conqueror claimed the throne of England.

King Harold II had been crowned in an earlier Abbey on the site of the present one. That earlier Abbey is also depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, the only known portrayal of it.

Is it possible that in a previous incarnation, as either a minor noble or a career soldier, I fought under King Harold...and months before, attended his coronation? Might I have picked up that eerie "message" - _"He that, being within me, though he be dead yet shall live"_ - because in terms of latitude and longitude, I was standing exactly where my former incarnation had stood, albeit in a newer building?

Back to the firmer ground of fan fiction!

As I planned the middle section of this story, Barnabas and Queen Elizabeth fall deeply in love. But because he wasn't born in England or in the reconstructed Collinwood, his link to his British incarnation isn't close enough. He doesn't look like Tom Seymour, and Dee can't make him mortal. He can only survive a short time away from his native soil. But Elizabeth obtains a specimen of American soil from Sir Walter Ralegh (I believe that's how the man spelled his name), and as Barnabas lies dying, she presses it into his hand...

Please read on...


	3. Chapter 3

_Click._

The room was flooded with light. Electric light.

The wrenching change left him gasping, gagging. A moment ago he'd been lying on the stone floor of a castle, with the Queen of England on the floor beside him, trying to warm his dying body with her own. Now he was sitting in a straight-backed chair, in...in...the drawing room of Collinwood...

_A dream?_

_**No! Impossible!**_

"Barnabas?"

Elizabeth, framed in the doorway. In pale blue nightgown and robe, she looked for a startling moment like a young girl. A very specific young girl, in pale blue nightgown and robe, who'd run into his arms long, long ago, and every fiber of his being ached with wanting her...

"Barnabas, I had a bad dream - something about you being in danger. I had to come down and check..." Her voice trailed off, and he realized she was staring at him. "_Barnabas?_ Wh-what's going on? Why are you dressed like that? And what - what are you doing with _a handful of dirt?_"

He gazed stupidly down at himself. Sixteenth-century clothes. Oh God, sixteenth-century clothes. And the soil from Ralegh's Virginia colony - real, all too real. Still clutched in his hand, sifting out from between his fingers.

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth," he heard himself saying in a strangled voice. "I didn't want to frighten you. That's why I waited until after you had gone to bed to change."

_Think, man, think!_ "I...I was attempting a sort of ritual. Sympathetic magic. Harmless, quite foolish really - trying to attune myself better to past time, in the hope it would help me reach Victoria. It didn't work. This dirt is -" _Something, anything._ "Earth from the grave of Sara Collins. I thought it might help, since she's obviously connected with all this."

"But those clothes. They appear to be the wrong time period. Or perhaps... not..." What did that mean?

"I know, the costume is all wrong." Lies flowing easily now - from long practice, God forgive him. "The outfit I wore to your costume ball would have been perfect. But of course, that was a rental. And I didn't have this idea tonight until after the rental shop had closed. So I had to make do with the one costume I own. This is something I wore in a college play." A wild impulse. "It was a play about the youth of England's Queen Elizabeth - the first Elizabeth. I played the role of her lover, Thomas Seymour."

"Really. The first Elizabeth. How...interesting." Had some memory stirred behind her eyes?

"You look exhausted, Barnabas. I worry about you... It's almost daybreak. I'd ask you to spend the rest of the night in one of the guest rooms, but I know you never will. So don't you think you should go home now? Get some rest?" Moving away from him.

What would happen if he swept her into his arms, kissed her, made passionate love to her? Could he reawaken _his_ Elizabeth, the tempestuous Queen of England, in this worn, frightened woman?

Would he be doing her any favor if he did?

_Almost daybreak._ Elizabeth had turned toward the stairs. The stairs of _her_ home, not his. A wave of weariness washed over him, and he knew it was too late, too late..._why had he not been born in Collinwood..._

Now he felt the irresistible pull of other needs. _His_ home. The Manor House. The "Old House" that was newer than the "new house." The house in which he had been born, and in which he had died died died died died died died

The house where his coffin waited in the basement.

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The End

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_**Author's Afterword:**_ The film referenced here is of course the Fifties movie _Young Bess_, which starred Jean Simmons as Elizabeth and her then husband, Stewart Granger, as Tom Seymour. _Young Bess_ isn't historically accurate; but it's great romance, and my only goal was to be faithful to the film.

My title "Native Soil" has a double meaning, since Jean Simmons was British, as is Ben Cross. A story set in England deals with _their_ "native soil."


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